Up Up Up Up Up

Terrific interview with Meika Loe about the broad cultural implications of Viagra. Remarkable and disquieting stuff...

The most interesting thing I’ve found is watching the public face of Viagra change over six years. We’ve moved from Bob Dole, with an emphasis on erectile dysfunction and a real attention to medical conditions, to Rafael Palmiro, who is a pro-baseball player. There's more emphasis on younger men. So the demographic has changed; it's wider in terms of age and ethnicity. These marketing campaigns liken sexual performance to performance on the field; everything is reduced to performance. .... These marketing campaigns can have the effect of reinforcing very narrow ideas about what’s "normal" for men ....

Dead-on. I've long thought that Viagra was perhaps the most pointless mass-market drug ever; Its marketing was a textbook case of creating a problem in order to sell a solution, and perhaps the most egregious example of the continuing medicalization of the human condition—of characterizing any unpleasant aspect of life as a "disorder" to be "treated" (preferably by pricey medications) rather than as an experience to be endured—and from which we may even learn things worth knowing.

It’s no longer normal for men to have sexual problems. Men in their early twenties ... who are plagued with performance anxiety, and want to ... see themselves as well-performing sexual beings—they're turning to pharmaceutical treatments to make that happen, rather than maybe talking with their partner or experimenting on their own without the help of medicine.

.... A performance culture is what we are bolstering here. It would be nice if there was room for human error and vulnerability and human reality in the broad spectrum of sexual pleasure and masculinity in all its form and more of a human based model here.

Yup. It's a deepening of the mind/body split in Western culture and medicine, where we demand that our meatframes function at baseline even when we're a mess inside. It's an unsustainable paradigm; you end up with a well-tuned, high-performance race car with a driver weeping so hard he doesn't notice he's headed for a brick wall.

And there's a palpable coarsening of our cultural discourse on sexuality in the wake of these boner pills, and it extends beyond the smutty jokes on late-night TV. It lies in the increasing commodification of sex qua sex, outwith any context of emotional companionship or even real pleasure—ability for ability's sake. It lies in the conceptual reduction of masculinity—not just male sexuality, but maleness itself—to a stiff prick.

And it lies, too, in a newly overground obsession with size. There was always a sub rosa economy based around "male enhancement"—the back-page ads for the creams and the pumps and the "exercise books" in their plain brown wrappers. But Viagra made possible the mainstream marketing of dodgy herbal supplements—and made possible, too, the frankly disturbing ad campaign featuring the mute "Mr. Big," with his terrifying rictus grin. Unleashing this priapic Joker onto the public airwaves is itself unforgivable, in my book.

There's one bit of encouraging information here, though:

[A] statistic from Pfizer [shows] that half of the men who have prescriptions for Viagra do not refill their prescriptions. This may be because of side effects. It may also be because it’s not working for many men, particularly men who have severe erectile problems or impotence. And it may just be that Viagra is not really solving the problems in the relationship or in a man’s life, and that there are other avenues for dealing with those issues.

Well, duh. To think that the keys to a better sex life may lie not in artificially-heightened blood circulation, but in trust, understanding and communication, in forgiveness, in being kind to yourself, in taking time, in talking...

Better keep that quiet. Talk like that is bad for business.

September Song

This is mostly for me, for later reference. Been looking for a nice, painterly piece of artwork with an autumnal theme—something hyper-rendered but also fantastical—and Maxfield Parrish was failing me. And then, out of this discussion of aesthetics in the service of ideology, a scene slid up sideways and all out of context...

A spectacular birch forest in Mongolia, its leaves a perfect yellow for only one week out of the year. Youth fighting experience. Spirits fighting gravity. All of us fighting inevitability.

In the memory, the sequence lingers as a series of vistas, a widescreen panorama; for all the billowing scarlet silk and steely clash of Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi at the foreground, the landscape is the real star. But in looking at the stills, we find that the wide shots are few and brief. The memory of the whole is stitched together from fragmented glimpses. That's the power of the montage—this sleight-of-eye, this capacity to make you see what you don't actually see. The most famous example (I just mistyped most as moist—wholly appropriate, actually) is the shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho. If you've read anything about the film, you know that we never see the knife stab Janet Leigh.

But we feel it. There are twenty-eight edits in those twenty seconds, and they hit with an almost physical force. This is—to pull out a debased and oft-misused word—kinetic filmmaking; not just fast, but conveying an actual sense of motion. Screenwriters sometimes use the term "smash cut" for this kind of edit. It's a brutal term, almost desperate—flailing for a way to convey, in words, the feeling of impact that you can get from image and sound.

I'm not sure what you'd call Zhang Yimou's technique of using many shots of a limited field of view to imply a much larger arena, this building up a picture of the whole from numbers of smaller bits—aggregatory editing, perhaps? But there's a recursive element at play here, as well; that is, the complete picture can be extrapolated from each of the pieces. Every shot of Flying Snow's ruined beauty, or the above shot of Moon's terrified bravado, contains within itself the whole story. And it's the story of autumn. The story of Autumn Leaves.

Would Edith Piaf have understood the ferocity brought to bear here against the evidence of time and the loss of love? Maybe not. But Cannonball Adderly? One hundred per-fucking-cent.

Huh.

Just noticed that when you roll over the link to my blog from Joe's sidebar, a little descriptor tag pops up: "Benign, grumpy, and wise."

Heh. Two out of three ain't bad.

Sunday Papers

Oh dear. I like James Lileks, I really do¹. Sure, his political writing is too often based on gut reactions to complex topics, and his worldview contains any number of unexamined assumptions. But he's a keen cultural observer, his geek cred is peerless, and best of all, he's funny—sometimes savagely so—and often moving; when he writes about the quiet joys of a quiet life, it resonates. Even in his occasional lapses into cornpone shtickery, the lines hum with honesty.

And then he goes and does something like this.

Oh dear.

Listen: Everybody likes to kick around a straw man, now and then. But this bit about the Times magazine and its imagined readership is fundamentally dishonest, as well as smug and patronizing.

And not a little desperate. There's a faint whiff of sour grapes and flop-sweat here, the mingled pride and anger of a man who has a deep need to believe that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune is just as important as the New York Times.

And it is. But by protesting overmuch, James is only hurting his own case. That, for me, encapsulates the paradox that makes it impossible for me to take seriously the majority of conservative cultural critique; Mainstream (i.e., Conservative) values are the bedrock of civilization, imperishable and self-evident in their manifest Rightness—and yet they must be constantly defended against assaults mounted by—whom? By a tiny "élite" routinely described as pathetic, out-of-touch, clueless, and morally-bankrupt.

So where's the threat? He's only a straw man after all, and you made him up yourself; Why does he scare you so?

¹ Boilerplate disclaimer autogenerated by a bloghelper scriptbot. Or at least it should be, given how often I find myself using it or some phrase much like it.

“See! Our Sentence Is Up.”

Offered without comment for the moment, because however true it rings, I need to get my head around the more precise mathematical and biological implications of the central analogy here; Words are powerful, and it would not do to be careless in their usage...

“Three years reading, five years sitebuilding and three more years working on the net boils down to this one obvious finding: Internet culture is nomadic. Web communities work like institutions—like school, like university, like prison. The newbie-top dog-release arc is the same. The only difference is that you have to realise yourself when your time’s up, and go and find the next one. This is nothing to do with the web contra the ‘real world’—of course your online experiences are real. But a web community is not a community: it’s a vector.”

Dancing About Architecture

Claire, who is eight, brought home a notice from her new music teacher; as an exercise in writing and critical thinking, each third-grader is being asked to keep a listening journal—a composition book in which the child will, at least once a week, write a little something about a piece of music that s/he has heard recently, and what s/he thought about it.

And thus the next generation of musicbloggers is born.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

¡Hijo de Una Gran’ Puta!

Shrieked, memorably, at the retreating form of Clint Eastwood by Eli Wallach, the New York Jew who inexplicably became the late Sixties film world’s go-to guy for playing Mexican banditos. Yeah, I was watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly last night, watching as I watch many DVDs—while ironing a pile of shirts, late at night, when everyone else in the house has gone to bed.

It’s been a long time since I watched the film, and I was struck by how its many bizarre incidents and images (e.g., the riderless coach careening across the desert, or the Union battalion gray and ghostly with the dust), which would, in a lesser film such as Cold Mountain or Dead Man, come across as whimsical or pretentious, never seem particularly outlandish in context. For all that his style can accurately be called operatic, even epic, Sergio Leone’s real genius is in keeping the movie grounded. Every bloody betrayal, every ghastly surprise, seems entirely plausible.

But I digress. I meant to talk about closed captions.

So I had the volume down to a whisper, out of courtesy to the wife & kids sleeping upstairs; and as I am wont to do, when watching TV with the sound turned down, I had switched on the closed caps. CC’s are kind of cool. Firstly, they’re generally in all capital letters, so it makes watching TV sort of like reading a comic book. And since they’re intended for the hearing-impaired, they convey a lot of information that simple subtitles don’t, things that a hearing viewer might pick up from a foreign-language film even if he doesn’t speak the language, but that a deaf viewer might not; closed captions are rife with indicators like [Sarcastically] or [Laughs nervously] or even [Romantic Ballad plays].

Imagine, then, my delight when the following captions appeared on my screen as the famous credit sequence began:

AAHHH EEEE AHHH

[CANNON FIRES]

AH-AH-AH-AH-AHH

[WIND INSTRUMENT REPEATS CRY]

My jaw dropped: were they going to attempt to replicate the entire score in text form? I awaited captions reading [MANIC SURF GUITAR] and [MANLY GRUNTS], but soon a single line came up: [THEME TO “THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY” PLAYS].

Which is a hell of a time-saver, when you think of it. By that logic, they could have handled the whole movie with a single caption reading [DIALOGUE AND SCORE FOR “THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY” PLAY].

And the rest, as they say, is silence.

Wittgenstein’s Telephone, Part II

How do you communicate with a person who never actually tells you anything, who breaks sullen silence but rarely, and then only to say, in accusing tones, “We never talk anymore”?

Wittgenstein’s Telephone, Part I

“Apropos of little, in college I helped to organize a radio broadcast of [John Cage’s] 4'33"—a performance on Baroque instruments, or so we claimed. It lasted only one minute, because tempos were much faster in the Baroque period...”